My Year of Flops Read Online Free PDF

drinking buddy, when you can simply have Karl Rove (Toby Jones) tell him, “What it all comes downto is who Joe Voter wants to sit down and have a beer with. And guess who that is?” before shooting an approving finger in W.’s direction.
    Stone assembled an impressive array of ringers to round out the supporting cast, though the result plays, to borrow Woodrow Wilson’s alleged praise of
Birth Of A Nation,
less like history written with lightning than like a
Saturday Night Live
sketch in which familiar faces have a go at playing top political figures. Thandie Newton decides to give her Condoleezza Rice the excitable nasal whine and demeanor of Olive Oyl, while the brilliant Jeffrey Wright gives us the Colin Powell of liberal daydreams, the noble voice of reason and restraint, a good man in an impossible situation. He’s the angel on Bush’s shoulder, overruled by thousands of neocon devils on the other side, baying for blood and oil.
    In its painful last act,
W.
is as lost as its subject during the final years of his presidency.
W.
lacks both righteous indignation and sympathy. Stone’s attitude toward his subject isn’t rage or empathy so much as passive aggression. Its attempts to generate sympathy for its subject are compromised by its reliance on clunky dumb-guy humor and an unfortunate need to shoehorn W.’s greatest verbal gaffes into strange, inaccurate contexts, like having W. deliver the famous “misunderestimating” line in a strategy meeting about the Middle East.
    When considering what Stone set out to do with
W
.—the first and hopefully last lame-duck presidential biopic—it’s instructive to think of what
Fahrenheit 9/11,
another manifesto by a loud, divisive, self-publicizing lefty blowhard, actually accomplished.
Fahrenheit 9/11
received the reception
W.
was denied. Even before its release,
9/11
transcended film and became not just a pop-culture phenomenon but also a cultural phenomenon. It was big news.
    Moore chronicled the tragicomic 2000 election with a visceral intensity that felt like an old wound being ripped open. Watching
Fahrenheit 9/11
was like reliving a national trauma. When Stone just barely dramatizes the run-up to the Iraq War, it feels like a rerun. Stone’s films have always been wildly, even irritatingly cinematic, but
W.
feels like a television movie shot on the cheap.
    Stone saves his worst crimes against subtlety for the very end, during a pair of fantasy sequences. In one, George H. W. decries W.’s presidency as nothing short of a “goddamned fiasco” and bitches him out for ruining things for H. W.’s beloved, beautiful, godlike favorite son Jeb. I’d somehow missed the film’s previous 700 references to H. W. being disappointed in W. and favoring Jeb, so I appreciated Stone once again making the film’s themes extra clear. In the second fantasy sequence, W. is patrolling center field for the Texas Rangers—a team he once co-owned—and lets a home-run ball get away from him. You know, like he let greatness get away from him during his presidency, and shit.
    Stone took a big risk making a biopic about the sitting president. That’s the kind of ambition I like to praise and damn with My Year Of Flops. Alas, the film everyone was going to be talking about became the film the culture more or less ignored. Let’s just hope Oliver Stone’s
Palin
never gets green-lit.
    Failure, Fiasco, Or Secret Success?
Fiasco
    Richard Dreyfuss On W.
    The ’70s ushered in a new era of unconventional leading men with offbeat looks and quirky personae. Richard Dreyfuss rode that wave to fame and glory as the Academy Award–winning star of hits like
American Graffiti, Jaws, The Goodbye Girl, Down & Out In Beverly Hills,
and
Stakeout.
    Richard Dreyfuss: Playing Dick Cheney was great. It was like a great meal. Unfortunately, it was done by a guy who took the politics out of the story, so it’ll